recorded engagement he was in association with "boy actresses," and no doubt he may have played Romeo to the Juliet of the most brilliant of these, his fellow apprentices, Kynaston, and possibly may have had to wait his curtain on "Hamlet" until Kynaston was properly shaved for Ophelia. The pursuit of play-acting at this period was conducted under distressing circumstances. The auditorium of the theatre presented a most disorderly scene; the fashionable but dissolute women of the town appearing masked in the open boxes and receiving unconcernedly the noisy attentions of the beaux during the progress of the play. The conduct of these riotous gallants and coarse women rendered the place well-nigh intolerable to decent patrons. Performers were frequently jeered at and their efforts at stilted emotionalism greeted with drunken yawps and howls of execration. Orangegirls, selected for their alluring appearance, under the leadership of an older woman styled "Orange Moll," pushed their way through the spectators of the pit clacking the virtues of their expensive fruits to the brawling crew who devoured the sweet juice and used the rinds to pelt at the actors. Not infrequently an insolent beau, bemused and heated with liquor, would lurch upon the stage from box or pit, or the so-termed "fop's corner" (there being no intervening row of footlights, albeit he had to beware lest in his assault he rip his finery and his laces on a sort of chevau de frise topping the protecting orchestra-rail), and start a pitched battle with the hapless actors, leading other noblemen to the fray, using the furniture and scene properties, and even drawing swords in earnest, the unlucky manager looking on the while despairing and helpless at the results of his own pandering to the doubtful privileges of the gallants of the town.

His was an early example of gouging the public; not satisfied with his legitimate profits in the takings at the door, he augmented them by the sale of special favors. The custom of the Elizabethan theatre had provided certain favored ones with seats on the stage itself, where they sat cluttering the entrances and exits, puffing the smoke from their long pipes into the very faces of the players. This

VOL. LXXXII.—26

feature, annoying alike to actors and audience, had been banished by royal order, but like the ticket-speculating theatre magnates of to-day the manager was not to be denied his graft. For a liberal tip, distinguished beaux were admitted not only behind the scenes and into the greenroom, but into the very tiring-rooms of the actresses, witnessing their robing and disrobing, and carrying on such scandalous conversations as would frequently put to flight the young serving-girls attendant upon these saucy queans.

The scandal grew until even Charles pretended to be shocked, and by an edict drove the practice out of vogue, forbidding the dressing-room privileges to the gilded fops, tearing the masks from the faces of the women spectators, and restoring decency to the course of the performance.

It is high time to see what manner of man is this Thomas Betterton; to do so it is best we go to Drury Lane on one of his Hamlet nights.

The theatre is well filled long before the curtain hour, as the lesser public who honor their Shakespeare and the acting of Betterton are avid for the events of the evening. It is a less rowdy crowd than that which occupied the boxes and pit on the previous evening, when Wycherly's salacious "Country Wife" drew the bucks, the rakes, and the wanton ladies of the town; nevertheless the auditorium is animated and noisy. The real play-lovers fill the balconies; for the most part they know nearly every line of the tragedy they love so well.

Down in the pit, partly benched and part standing room, is the usual mixed rabble of the well-to-do, officers in semiuniform, East India merchants talking trade, brokers from the Exchange matching prices for to-morrow, three or four liberal-minded clergymen, critics, pamphleteers, London aldermen, rich shopkeepers, lawyers, members of the Parliament, poets, dramatists, a sprinkling of actors who are out of the bill, frequenters of the coffee-houses, men about town. There is a fair representation of the fops as well, though this is not one of their nights; they form a group by themselves over in the corners where they may flirt with the beauties in the boxes.

The orange-girls are busy, now and then getting into an altercation over rights in a certain customer, possibly that red-faced alderman who encourages both sides to a hair-pulling match. A ribboned gallant steals an orange from the basket of one of the vendors; she retrieves it and bestows a volume of billingsgate on the filcher. He retorts with some lewd proposals and, while his jewelled fingers steal down her plump neck, receives a smart slap on the cheek. She moves on with her wares, quite happy and unruffled—it is all part of the game.

The boxes are animated with beauty, gay costumes, fashionable chatter, spirited repartee, lively disputes and screams of laughter. Complacent lords sit majestic, silent and stupid, masked ladies wave their fans to gallants in the opposite boxes. A handsome soldier leans over the chair of a blonde little thing in rosecolored satin, the long curls of his periwig sweeping her bare bosom; she glances at the dozing elderly husband at her side, and gives an assenting nod to his proposal. As he moves away his hand trails a caress across her shoulder.

The candle-trimmers are adjusting the lights-the play is about to begin. As the curtain rises there is still the gabble of the spectators, but it soon hushes as the Ghost stalks into the affrighted presence of Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio upon the platform at Elsinore. The scene terminates with an audience intent on the play-expectant, silent.

Now a fanfare of trumpets, and enter their Majesties of Denmark clad in the costume of Charles II, stately and formal; the sitters and standees in the wings make way respectfully for the procession. The King leads on Mrs. Barry as the Queen (she is greeted with hearty though orderly applause), then follows Betterton, and the plaudits continue for some moments. But we have received a shock of surprise and disappointment; we forget that we have projected ourselves back two centuries and a half. Here is no spirited David Garrick or graceful Spranger Barry, but an ill-formed, squat gentleman whose black court costume, laces, and curled periwig are not sufficient to conceal the clumsy figure beneath them. The head is so large as to be almost out of

proportion, the neck is short and thick, and the shoulders stooped; to these are added a corpulent body, thick legs, and large feet. The face that looks out from its framework of curls is broad and somewhat pock-fretted; in it are set two small but expressive eyes, capable of portraying an unusual yariety of emotion. His arms, which are short and fat, are kept at rest, except at occasional intervals; his left hand lodged in his breast between his coat and his waistcoat, his right conveying the appropriate gesture to his speech.

This latter gives us a second disappointment. As he begins ""Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother," it rasps and grumbles like the wooden works of an ancient clock. The entire personality of the man seems an anachronism.

But presently, as he listens to the tale of the spectral visitor, we are aware of something arresting, the voice loses its discordance, and in its strained attitude of listening excitement we lose all sight of the cumbersome figure with its unseemly costume.

Our ears have grown accustomed to the grandiloquence of speech, the weighty pauses, and the formal emphases. We yield to the majesty of demeanor as we yield to the spell of the perfect proportions of Sir Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral.

Now we question nothing. The scene with the Ghost takes place, and I shall let Mr. Colley Cibber tell you about it:

He opened with a pause of mute amazement; then rising slowly to a sol mn, trembling voice, he made the Ghost equally terrible to the Spectator as to himself; and in the descriptive part gave him, the Boldness of his Expostulation was of the natural Emotions which the ghastly Vision still governed by Decency, manly, but not braving, his voice never rising into that seeming outrage, or wild Defiance of what he naturally

rever'd.

Even the fops in the audience are silent the orange-girls spellbound. Mr. Samuel Pepys is at the play and he says of his Hamlet: "It is the best acted part ever done by man.”

He had evidently won the loyalty of Mr. Pepys, who spoke of him as a serious, sober gentleman given to studious pursuits and bearing his riches and his honors with humility. Only once did he bring upon himself the reprimand of the diarist,

But not for worlds would I rob the dear old man of his moment of mirth even though it be in a tragedy. If ever an actor earned the privilege of laughter it was he. Notwithstanding the unusual honor and homage paid to him, the highest salary he ever received was the lavish sum of five pounds a week, but upon this he was enabled to establish a home wherein domestic happiness ruled supreme. His wife adored him; they had been lovers from their youthful days when she first played Juliet to his Romeo. My little volume of Betterton's "Life" with its wealth of punctuation marks, its s's that look like f's, and its capitalized nouns, is mainly a treatise on the art of acting as he conceived it. Little is left to nature or impulse; all is stately and measured, as we may fancy the general conduct of the performers in the windy tragedies and mannered comedies of the period, Otway, Dryden, Wycherly, and Vanbrugh. It was scarcely to be expected of a gentleman clad in voluminous velvet garments trimmed with yards of lace, mounted on high-heeled buskins, and all but extinguished under the ringlets of his periwig, that he should be anything but pompous and grandiloquent. It was not real life that the stage represented, but a mock reality, conventionalized, transformed, and clothed in rhetoric. Passion went by rule, gaiety to the beat of the metronome, emotion was measured by the yard-stick, and dignity governed the manners of the mimic world.

But no exemplar of this school could compete with Betterton. He subdued his hearers to rapt attention by a majestic and magnetic control. Says Cibber:

I never heard a line of tragedy come from him wherein my judgment, my ear and my imagination were not fully satisfied, which since his time I cannot say of any one actor whatsoever.

After his retirement into privacy and into the distresses of his stone and gout,

"Had you with-held your Favours on this Night,
Old Shakespeare's Ghost, had risen to do him
Right,
With indignation had you seen him frown
Upon a worthless, witless, tasteless Town:
Griev'd and Repining you had heard him say,
Why are the Muses' Labours cast away?
Why did I only write what only he could Play?”

When he took his wife into his embrace that night it was with a foreboding that all was not well-but, notwithstanding the agony his gouty foot was causing him, he gave her a kiss and a cheery word and was helped to his coach. Arriving at the theatre he was carried to his dressingroom, where he thrust his foot into cold water to reduce its swelling before he could even bear as much as a slipper upon it.

Waiting the veteran's appearance was an audience representative of the best that London could boast and packed from pit to gallery. In its welcome, as he came limping upon the stage as Melantius in "The Maid's Tragedy," Betterton forgot his ills, and under a barrage of bravos and shouts of loving approval he acted to the end of the play with a miraculous renewal of his youthful fire.

He was never again seen publicly, and in forty-eight hours he had reached the undiscovered country in whose confines death's surcease came not only to his bodily woes but to his financial worries as well. He had ventured in an overseas enterprise that proved disastrous, and his benefit fund was of great assistance to his widow, although it was not long before this faithful soul followed her husband.

So passed from view a stately, splendid figure.

For more than fifty years, from Charles II to Queen Anne, his has been the finest example of excellence among the servants of their Majesties.

No better description of him could be given than is contained in three words of the theatre license granted by King William:

THOMAS BETTERTON, GENTLEMAN

T is interesting to observe the different routes by which men in this country arrive within hailing distance of the Presidency. When the long list of those who some successfully and most unsuccessfully-have aspired in the past, and those who to-day are more or less openly in the White House race is considered, it is clear there is no standard method of approach, no beaten path to follow. Some arrive from one direction, some from another. Men like Wilson, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Hughes, Hoover, become Presidents, Presidential candidates, or Presidential possibilities through the vibrancy of their personalities, the power of their intellects, the renown of their achievements, with no help from the party machines-often in the face of their intense hostility. Some, like Mr. Coolidge, arrive through the simple expedient of early getting aboard the escalator of the dominant party in a large and politically important State, standing steady back of the party leaders, avoiding controversy and conflicts, docilely going along in a well-disciplined, complacent and commonplace way. Others, like Governor Smith, start in fiercely playing the party game, carve out a tempestuous political career, forge to the front, and by sheer force of character and ability become outstanding leaders, either winning control or taking possession of a machine. Occasionally one of the crusading species-a Bryan, or a Reed, or a McAdoo-through the fire of his eloquence and the force of his fighting spirit, or by the sudden appeal of a popular issue, seizes a party nomination or, getting within seizing distance, just misses seizing it.

And then there is Ritchie-Albert Cabell Ritchie, governor of Marylanddifferent from all of these present-day Presidential aspirants and unlike any in the past who can now be recalled-with

out the might of the Wilson-Cleveland breed of statesman, not in the least the Smith type of leader, by no means the drab sort of business-bossed political plodder Mr. Coolidge is; neither a politician nor an idealist, without much inner glow or pretense of greatness. Yet no clear-headed, posted person will dispute the fact that to-day Ritchie is within hailing distance if not of the Presidency at least of the Presidential nomination. He is far from being the leading candidate of his party. He will not go into the next Democratic convention with many more votes behind him than the sixteen he had from his own State last time, but he has an under-cover strength utterly lacking before, and his strategic position and reserve force are amazingly greater than is generally grasped. This is no boost of the Ritchie candidacy, but the plain fact is that the potentialities of the position into which he has worked himself are being largely overlooked-and it is in his interests that they should be. It may be that he will not figure in the convention other than as the favorite son of an unimportant State, but he may-very easily may-if one thing happens, come out of it as his party's candidate for the Presidency. That one thing, of course, is the failure of the Smith candidacy. As things stand to-day, any betting man would give odds on Smith getting the nomination. The chances are he will, but Ritchie, who sincerely believes that Smith is entitled to the nomination, that he ought to be nominated, and who will go to the convention prepared to deliver his Maryland vote to Smith if, when, and as he needs it-Ritchie is the next best bet. There is no doubt of that. The reasons are clear-he is not only in the best position to inherit the Smith strength but he is the second choice of practically every influential Democratic leader, not only in New York but outside, at present interested in the Smith candidacy-far more so than Jim Reed or any one else.

This is one of the facts of the existing Democratic situation that has heretofore escaped more than casual mention in the press, and which few of the professional political analysts appear to have noticed. Most of them will likely dispute it now, but it is so all the same. Those who have watched Ritchie for the last four years and know what he has been doing, know it to be true. Several things have combined thus to put him second on every well-kept Democratic slate. One of these, of course, is the fact that since the New York convention in which he first appeared on the national scene, he has been elected governor of Maryland for the third time by a majority greater than that given any other man for any other office in the history of the State no small feat when it is fairly considered. Maryland gives her governors a four-year term, and until 1922 it had been her unbroken rule, observed since the Civil War, not to reelect them. Ritchie smashed that precedent five years ago and then, putting aside the United States senatorship, which he could have had without a struggle, last year dared to run again for governor and was overwhelmingly reelected. His three terms will extend over a longer period than Smith's four, and his third election to a four-year term stands him out now as having consecutively served his State as governor longer than any other governor has served any other State in the country in two generations.

That's one thing. Another is that since the day the 1924 convention adjourned, Ritchie has been a candidate for the 1928 nomination. There is nothing surprising in that. It was natural, human, inevitable. Once mention a man who has had a taste of public office for the Presidency -even in a whisper-and he is an incurable candidate the balance of his life. They never completely recover-not even when they publicly renounce all hope as did Mr. Hughes some months ago though at the time it seemed to some that this particular renunciation was more hollow than real, that in order really to remove oneself from a race, it is necessary either to be in the race or to have a chance of winning if entered. In his candidacy Ritchie is no different from any of the rest. Where he differs is in the perfect

candor with which he promotes his candidacy, the complete absence of self-consciousness, coyness, and posing, the entire clearness with which he sees himself and his chances. If there were nothing else about the man, this alone makes him unique among present-day aspirants. Seeing no reason to conceal the fact that he would love to be President, he sees no reason to pretend aloofness, none to prevent him from actively going after his chance so long as he does not destroy his dignity. And that he has done and is doing. Without personal press-agents, publicity bureaus, organization, committees, or money, he has conducted an active, quiet, but singularly effective campaign. No man in either party has done as much work for himself-or done it so well. He has not neglected his job in Maryland but neither has he neglected an opportunity to enhance his political fortunes outside. In the past four years, these opportunities have carried him, travelling and speaking, into many cities and States. He has been as far West as Omaha and Kansas City, as far South as Richmond, north to Boston, and into Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New Yorkand he is still going. He overlooks few, if any, bets, and wherever he has gone he has done two things-first, made a really fine impression on the crowd with his speech; second, made a particularly good impression on the practical political leaders with his personality. And at Annapolis in the past three years a considerable number of Democratic leaders from various States have come to visit and been entertained. When the show-down comes-if it ever does-it will be found that the Democratic bosses in the big States who swing delegations and have heretofore dominated conventions, know Ritchie as they did not know him before, like him, are his personal friends.

The third thing that has contributed to building this Maryland governor up as the only national political figure his State has produced since the late Arthur Pue Gorman died, are his speeches. No matter how energetically a man goes after the Presidency, excepting the few instances where obscure and insignificant men have profited by an act of God or a sudden stroke of luck, he has to have something